Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Chapter 22

The Search Party

When dawn broke upon the little camp of Frenchmen in the heart of the jungle it found a sad and
disheartened group.

As soon as it was light enough to see their surroundings Lieutenant Charpentier sent men in groups of three in
several directions to locate the trail, and in ten minutes it was found and the expedition was hurrying back toward the
beach.

It was slow work, for they bore the bodies of six dead men, two more having succumbed during the night, and several
of those who were wounded required support to move even very slowly.

Charpentier had decided to return to camp for reinforcements, and then make an attempt to track down the natives and
rescue D’Arnot.

It was late in the afternoon when the exhausted men reached the clearing by the beach, but for two of them the
return brought so great a happiness that all their suffering and heartbreaking grief was forgotten on the instant.

As the little party emerged from the jungle the first person that Professor Porter and Cecil Clayton saw was Jane,
standing by the cabin door.

With a little cry of joy and relief she ran forward to greet them, throwing her arms about her father’s neck and
bursting into tears for the first time since they had been cast upon this hideous and adventurous shore.

Professor Porter strove manfully to suppress his own emotions, but the strain upon his nerves and weakened vitality
were too much for him, and at length, burying his old face in the girl’s shoulder, he sobbed quietly like a tired
child.

Jane led him toward the cabin, and the Frenchmen turned toward the beach from which several of their fellows were
advancing to meet them.

Clayton, wishing to leave father and daughter alone, joined the sailors and remained talking with the officers until
their boat pulled away toward the cruiser whither Lieutenant Charpentier was bound to report the unhappy outcome of his
adventure.

Then Clayton turned back slowly toward the cabin. His heart was filled with happiness. The woman he loved was
safe.

He wondered by what manner of miracle she had been spared. To see her alive seemed almost unbelievable.

As he approached the cabin he saw Jane coming out. When she saw him she hurried forward to meet him.

“Jane!” he cried, “God has been good to us, indeed. Tell me how you escaped — what form Providence took to save you
for — us.”

He had never before called her by her given name. Forty-eight hours before it would have suffused Jane with a soft
glow of pleasure to have heard that name from Clayton’s lips — now it frightened her.

“Mr. Clayton,” she said quietly, extending her hand, “first let me thank you for your chivalrous loyalty to my dear
father. He has told me how noble and self-sacrificing you have been. How can we repay you!”

Clayton noticed that she did not return his familiar salutation, but he felt no misgivings on that score. She had
been through so much. This was no time to force his love upon her, he quickly realized.

“I am already repaid,” he said. “Just to see you and Professor Porter both safe, well, and together again. I do not
think that I could much longer have endured the pathos of his quiet and uncomplaining grief.

“It was the saddest experience of my life, Miss Porter; and then, added to it, there was my own grief — the greatest
I have ever known. But his was so hopeless — his was pitiful. It taught me that no love, not even that of a man for his
wife may be so deep and terrible and self-sacrificing as the love of a father for his daughter.”

The girl bowed her head. There was a question she wanted to ask, but it seemed almost sacrilegious in the face of
the love of these two men and the terrible suffering they had endured while she sat laughing and happy beside a godlike
creature of the forest, eating delicious fruits and looking with eyes of love into answering eyes.

But love is a strange master, and human nature is still stranger, so she asked her question.

“Where is the forest man who went to rescue you? Why did he not return?”

“I do not understand,” said Clayton. “Whom do you mean?”

“He who has saved each of us — who saved me from the gorilla.”

“Oh,” cried Clayton, in surprise. “It was he who rescued you? You have not told me anything of your adventure, you
know.”

“But the wood man,” she urged. “Have you not seen him? When we heard the shots in the jungle, very faint and far
away, he left me. We had just reached the clearing, and he hurried off in the direction of the fighting. I know he went
to aid you.”

Her tone was almost pleading — her manner tense with suppressed emotion. Clayton could not but notice it, and he
wondered, vaguely, why she was so deeply moved — so anxious to know the whereabouts of this strange creature.

Yet a feeling of apprehension of some impending sorrow haunted him, and in his breast, unknown to himself, was
implanted the first germ of jealousy and suspicion of the ape-man, to whom he owed his life.

“We did not see him,” he replied quietly. “He did not join us.” And then after a moment of thoughtful pause:
“Possibly he joined his own tribe — the men who attacked us.” He did not know why he had said it, for he did not
believe it.

The girl looked at him wide eyed for a moment.

“No!” she exclaimed vehemently, much too vehemently he thought. “It could not be. They were savages.”

Clayton looked puzzled.

“He is a strange, half-savage creature of the jungle, Miss Porter. We know nothing of him. He neither speaks nor
understands any European tongue — and his ornaments and weapons are those of the West Coast savages.”

Clayton was speaking rapidly.

“There are no other human beings than savages within hundreds of miles, Miss Porter. He must belong to the tribes
which attacked us, or to some other equally savage — he may even be a cannibal.”

Jane blanched.

“I will not believe it,” she half whispered. “It is not true. You shall see,” she said, addressing Clayton, “that he
will come back and that he will prove that you are wrong. You do not know him as I do. I tell you that he is a
gentleman.”

Clayton was a generous and chivalrous man, but something in the girl’s breathless defense of the forest man stirred
him to unreasoning jealousy, so that for the instant he forgot all that they owed to this wild demi-god, and he
answered her with a half sneer upon his lip.

“Possibly you are right, Miss Porter,” he said, “but I do not think that any of us need worry about our
carrion-eating acquaintance. The chances are that he is some half-demented castaway who will forget us more quickly,
but no more surely, than we shall forget him. He is only a beast of the jungle, Miss Porter.”

The girl did not answer, but she felt her heart shrivel within her.

She knew that Clayton spoke merely what he thought, and for the first time she began to analyze the structure which
supported her newfound love, and to subject its object to a critical examination.

Slowly she turned and walked back to the cabin. She tried to imagine her wood-god by her side in the saloon of an
ocean liner. She saw him eating with his hands, tearing his food like a beast of prey, and wiping his greasy fingers
upon his thighs. She shuddered.

She saw him as she introduced him to her friends — uncouth, illiterate — a boor; and the girl winced.

She had reached her room now, and as she sat upon the edge of her bed of ferns and grasses, with one hand resting
upon her rising and falling bosom, she felt the hard outlines of the man’s locket.

She drew it out, holding it in the palm of her hand for a moment with tear-blurred eyes bent upon it. Then she
raised it to her lips, and crushing it there buried her face in the soft ferns, sobbing.

“Beast?” she murmured. “Then God make me a beast; for, man or beast, I am yours.”

She did not see Clayton again that day. Esmeralda brought her supper to her, and she sent word to her father that
she was suffering from the reaction following her adventure.

The next morning Clayton left early with the relief expedition in search of Lieutenant D’Arnot. There were two
hundred armed men this time, with ten officers and two surgeons, and provisions for a week.

They carried bedding and hammocks, the latter for transporting their sick and wounded.

It was a determined and angry company — a punitive expedition as well as one of relief. They reached the site of the
skirmish of the previous expedition shortly after noon, for they were now traveling a known trail and no time was lost
in exploring.

From there on the elephant-track led straight to Mbonga’s village. It was but two o’clock when the head of the
column halted upon the edge of the clearing.

Lieutenant Charpentier, who was in command, immediately sent a portion of his force through the jungle to the
opposite side of the village. Another detachment was dispatched to a point before the village gate, while he remained
with the balance upon the south side of the clearing.

It was arranged that the party which was to take its position to the north, and which would be the last to gain its
station should commence the assault, and that their opening volley should be the signal for a concerted rush from all
sides in an attempt to carry the village by storm at the first charge.

For half an hour the men with Lieutenant Charpentier crouched in the dense foliage of the jungle, waiting the
signal. To them it seemed like hours. They could see natives in the fields, and others moving in and out of the village
gate.

At length the signal came — a sharp rattle of musketry, and like one man, an answering volley tore from the jungle
to the west and to the south.

The natives in the field dropped their implements and broke madly for the palisade. The French bullets mowed them
down, and the French sailors bounded over their prostrate bodies straight for the village gate.

So sudden and unexpected the assault had been that the whites reached the gates before the frightened natives could
bar them, and in another minute the village street was filled with armed men fighting hand to hand in an inextricable
tangle.

For a few moments the blacks held their ground within the entrance to the street, but the revolvers, rifles and
cutlasses of the Frenchmen crumpled the native spearmen and struck down the black archers with their bows
halfdrawn.

Soon the battle turned to a wild rout, and then to a grim massacre; for the French sailors had seen bits of
D’Arnot’s uniform upon several of the black warriors who opposed them.

They spared the children and those of the women whom they were not forced to kill in self-defense, but when at
length they stopped, parting, blood covered and sweating, it was because there lived to oppose them no single warrior
of all the savage village of Mbonga.

Carefully they ransacked every hut and corner of the village, but no sign of D’Arnot could they find. They
questioned the prisoners by signs, and finally one of the sailors who had served in the French Congo found that he
could make them understand the bastard tongue that passes for language between the whites and the more degraded tribes
of the coast, but even then they could learn nothing definite regarding the fate of D’Arnot.

Only excited gestures and expressions of fear could they obtain in response to their inquiries concerning their
fellow; and at last they became convinced that these were but evidences of the guilt of these demons who had
slaughtered and eaten their comrade two nights before.

At length all hope left them, and they prepared to camp for the night within the village. The prisoners were herded
into three huts where they were heavily guarded. Sentries were posted at the barred gates, and finally the village was
wrapped in the silence of slumber, except for the wailing of the native women for their dead.

The next morning they set out upon the return march. Their original intention had been to burn the village, but this
idea was abandoned and the prisoners were left behind, weeping and moaning, but with roofs to cover them and a palisade
for refuge from the beasts of the jungle.

Slowly the expedition retraced its steps of the preceding day. Ten loaded hammocks retarded its pace. In eight of
them lay the more seriously wounded, while two swung beneath the weight of the dead.

Clayton and Lieutenant Charpentier brought up the rear of the column; the Englishman silent in respect for the
other’s grief, for D’Arnot and Charpentier had been inseparable friends since boyhood.

Clayton could not but realize that the Frenchman felt his grief the more keenly because D’Arnot’s sacrifice had been
so futile, since Jane had been rescued before D’Arnot had fallen into the hands of the savages, and again because the
service in which he had lost his life had been outside his duty and for strangers and aliens; but when he spoke of it
to Lieutenant Charpentier, the latter shook his head.

“No, Monsieur,” he said, “D’Arnot would have chosen to die thus. I only grieve that I could not have died for him,
or at least with him. I wish that you could have known him better, Monsieur. He was indeed an officer and a gentleman —
a title conferred on many, but deserved by so few.

“He did not die futilely, for his death in the cause of a strange American girl will make us, his comrades, face our
ends the more bravely, however they may come to us.”

Clayton did not reply, but within him rose a new respect for Frenchmen which remained undimmed ever after.

It was quite late when they reached the cabin by the beach. A single shot before they emerged from the jungle had
announced to those in camp as well as on the ship that the expedition had been too late — for it had been prearranged
that when they came within a mile or two of camp one shot was to be fired to denote failure, or three for success,
while two would have indicated that they had found no sign of either D’Arnot or his black captors.

So it was a solemn party that awaited their coming, and few words were spoken as the dead and wounded men were
tenderly placed in boats and rowed silently toward the cruiser.

Clayton, exhausted from his five days of laborious marching through the jungle and from the effects of his two
battles with the blacks, turned toward the cabin to seek a mouthful of food and then the comparative ease of his bed of
grasses after two nights in the jungle.

By the cabin door stood Jane.

“The poor lieutenant?” she asked. “Did you find no trace of him?”

“We were too late, Miss Porter,” he replied sadly.

“Tell me. What had happened?” she asked.

“I cannot, Miss Porter, it is too horrible.”

“You do not mean that they had tortured him?” she whispered.

“We do not know what they did to him BEFORE they killed him,” he answered, his face drawn with fatigue and the
sorrow he felt for poor D’Arnot and he emphasized the word before.

“BEFORE they killed him! What do you mean? They are not —? They are not —?”

She was thinking of what Clayton had said of the forest man’s probable relationship to this tribe and she could not
frame the awful word.

“Yes, Miss Porter, they were — cannibals,” he said, almost bitterly, for to him too had suddenly come the thought of
the forest man, and the strange, unaccountable jealousy he had felt two days before swept over him once more.

And then in sudden brutality that was as unlike Clayton as courteous consideration is unlike an ape, he blurted
out:

“When your forest god left you he was doubtless hurrying to the feast.”

He was sorry ere the words were spoken though he did not know how cruelly they had cut the girl. His regret was for
his baseless disloyalty to one who had saved the lives of every member of his party, and offered harm to none.

The girl’s head went high.

“There could be but one suitable reply to your assertion, Mr. Clayton,” she said icily, “and I regret that I am not
a man, that I might make it.” She turned quickly and entered the cabin.

Clayton was an Englishman, so the girl had passed quite out of sight before he deduced what reply a man would have
made.

“Upon my word,” he said ruefully, “she called me a liar. And I fancy I jolly well deserved it,” he added
thoughtfully. “Clayton, my boy, I know you are tired out and unstrung, but that’s no reason why you should make an ass
of yourself. You’d better go to bed.”

But before he did so he called gently to Jane upon the opposite side of the sailcloth partition, for he wished to
apologize, but he might as well have addressed the Sphinx. Then he wrote upon a piece of paper and shoved it beneath
the partition.

Jane saw the little note and ignored it, for she was very angry and hurt and mortified, but — she was a woman, and
so eventually she picked it up and read it.

MY DEAR MISS PORTER:

I had no reason to insinuate what I did. My only excuse is that my nerves must be unstrung — which is no excuse at
all.

Please try and think that I did not say it. I am very sorry. I would not have hurt YOU, above all others in the
world. Say that you forgive me.

WM. CECIL CLAYTON.

“He did think it or he never would have said it,” reasoned the girl, “but it cannot be true — oh, I know it is not
true!”

One sentence in the letter frightened her: “I would not have hurt YOU above all others in the world.”

A week ago that sentence would have filled her with delight, now it depressed her.

She wished she had never met Clayton. She was sorry that she had ever seen the forest god. No, she was glad. And
there was that other note she had found in the grass before the cabin the day after her return from the jungle, the
love note signed by Tarzan of the Apes.

Who could be this new suitor? If he were another of the wild denizens of this terrible forest what might he not do
to claim her?

“Esmeralda! Wake up,” she cried.

“You make me so irritable, sleeping there peacefully when you know perfectly well that the world is filled with
sorrow.”

“Gaberelle!” screamed Esmeralda, sitting up. “What is it now? A hipponocerous? Where is he, Miss Jane?”

“Nonsense, Esmeralda, there is nothing. Go back to sleep. You are bad enough asleep, but you are infinitely worse
awake.”

“Yes honey, but what’s the matter with you, precious? You acts sort of disgranulated this evening.”

“Oh, Esmeralda, I’m just plain ugly to-night,” said the girl. “Don’t pay any attention to me — that’s a dear.”

“Yes, honey; now you go right to sleep. Your nerves are all on edge. What with all these ripotamuses and man eating
geniuses that Mister Philander been telling about — Lord, it ain’t no wonder we all get nervous prosecution.”